Sharon R. Higgins is an Oakland parent activist who runs several blogs and does great research. One of her blogs is The Perimeter Primate. Another is Charter School Scandals. She also follows the Gulen charter chain.

P.S. Sharon does not mention it but David Whitman, who praised Chavis’s school, is Arne Duncan’s chief speechwriter. Whitman’s book is called Sweating the Small Stuff, an admiring account of “no-excuses” schools that practice paternalism.

Here she tells the amazing story of the American Indian Charter Schools in her own city of Oakland.

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Update on American Indian Model charter schools and Ben Chavis

This past week the Oakland school board voted 6-1 to issue a “notice of intent to revoke” the charters of the three high-performing, “no-excuses” American Indian-named charter schools associated with Ben Chavis, the foul-mouthed and controversial director. A public hearing will be held on February 13 and the final decision will be made in March. If the OUSD school board ultimately revokes the charters, the schools could appeal to the Alameda County Board of Education, and if unsuccessful, to the California State Board of Education.

This current situation is the result of an investigation which revealed “$3.8 million in questionable expenditures, rife with conflicts of interest, from construction contracts and lease agreements to mandatory summer programs going to Chavis’s companies…” Ben Chavis had cleverly placed close associates on the American Indian Model Schools (AIMS) board of directors and his wife in charge of the books. The County Superintendent referred the findings to the District Attorney several months ago, but no one has yet been charged with a crime.

To date, the California Department of Education has terminated the schools’ ASES funding (After School Education and Safety Program) due to misappropriation of funds. And the California Finance Authority has found AIMS in default of Charter School Facility Grant Program Agreements. Chavis has been the landlord of all three school properties for many years and continues to get $62,564 in monthly rent payments, $750,772 per year.

Among those who have glorified and promoted Ben Chavis and his charter schools are:

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who once hailed the school as an “education miracle”
Washington Post columnists George Will and Jay Mathews
Democrats for Education Reform board member Whitney Tilson
The Los Angeles Times, in a lengthy piece by Mitchell Landsberg
John Stossel, first on ABC’s 20/20, then again on his Fox Business show
The Cato InstituteThe National Review, which described Chavis as “undeniably one of the country’s finest educators.”MSNBC, which featured Chavis on “Making the Grade” in 2010 and again on “Education Nation”David Whitman, Fordham Institute staff member and former U.S. News & World Reporter, who included AIPCS as one of six ‘paternalistic’ schools in his 2008 book promoted by David Brooks and others

Chavis was hired in 2001 to lead Oakland’s struggling American Indian Public Charter School (AIPCS), a school that had been created to help Native American students. His first year, the enrollment at AIPCS was 106. Chavis opened a high school in 2006 and a second middle school in 2007. In 2011-12 the three schools enrolled a total of 698 students.

Chavis’ supporters never wanted to look too closely at how he began to engineer the school’s demographics once he arrived at AIPCS, turning his primary interest towards recruiting Asian families. The number of Asian students increased from zero (0%) to 473 (68%), with the remaining students in 2011-12 being Hispanic (17%) and Black (10%). To compare, the district’s enrollment that same year was 14% Asian, 41% Hispanic, and 32% Black.

As for the original intent of the school – to help Native American students – during Chavis’ first year, AIPCS enrolled 45 (43%) American Indian/Alaska Native students. By 2011-12, there were only 6 AI/AN students (<1%) at all three schools.

Over the years a lot students and/or parents have either been forced out or have become so dissatisfied that they’ve left. AIPCS’s Grade 6 to Grade 8 student retention for the past two years has averaged 66%, and AIPCS II’s was only 57%. The high school’s Grade 9 to Grade 12 student retention for the past two years was only 56%. The obvious question is, if these are such great schools that should be upheld as a model, why do so many students leave?

More and more, it seems like Ben Chavis’ charter schools might be coming to their end. Without the presence of a strong and independent board of directors, their governance is now in total disarray. The sense is that Oakland’s school board is quite determined, and it isn’t likely that this particular group will be granted a charter by the county or the state considering all that is known. Some people think a completely different charter school operator might enter into the picture somehow. At this point, many Oakland residents just feel sorry for the families and hope that something of value will be learned from this experience. Locals who have been aware of Ben Chavis’ shenanigans for years could have warned all the people who promoted him that the “miracle” they believed was not exactly so.

A timeline of news articles about Ben Chavis and his charter schools is here. Tables of the enrollment figures are here.

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Is anyone surprised at this outcome when Ben Chavis is involved? He has been bad news for a very long time. A review of his tenure with the NAACP would have reveled a similar pattern of operational and financial incompetence.

In today’s media landscape being wrong brings no consequences whatsoever provided the millionaire pundits pay homage to the billionaire boys club and our fearless leaders in government office. Look at all the millionaire media pundits who were and still are wrong about the economic meltdown in 2008, Iraq’s WMDs, CIA torture, and climate change, yet continue to get oversized paychecks from the networks and are granted access to interviews with the powerful.

Shaming shameless and unprincipled media stars by appealing to their sponsors and their audiences is the only way to get the attention of these unprincipled profiteers. Parents and teachers must call the sponsors of the programs who feature these individuals and complain.

An example is the online activist group Color of Change. Color of Change was responsible for gathering millions of people to e-mail and call advertisers to reject their products if they continued to support Glenn Beck & Rush Limbaugh’s racism. http://colorofchange.org/press/

The list of snookered media types is evidence of wishful thinking: everyone WANTS to fix troubled schools on the cheap so whenever something seems to accomplish that it is trumpeted far and wide… and think tanks like the Cato Institute serve as amplifiers. Michelle Rhee’s “success” and Chavis’ “success” bring to mind the aphorism: if something looks too good to be true then it probably is.

Is it any wonder that Chavis got away with this for so long? One of the culprits is the DOE itself. The audit report below demonstrates that there has been complete disregard for the monitoring of approx. $130,000,000 in grants given to charters by the DOE. The monitoring was done by WestEd, an organization that is funded in part by the Gates Foundation. Sadly, many well known educators are on WestEd’s board of directors, including the CA Superintendent of Instruction, Tom Torlakson.

“Because OII did not (1) require that grantees and subgrantees develop corrective action plans to address monitoring issues and deficiencies, (2) have a risk-based approach for selecting non- SEA grantees for monitoring, and (3) adequately monitor fiscal activities, there is a heightened risk that grantees were not fully complying with program goals and objectives as well as Federal laws and regulations. As a result, there is increased risk that Department funds were not used for the intent and purpose of the program.”

“Monitoring procedures developed by WestEd and approved by OII included subgrantee monitoring by the SEA and use of the Charter School Program funds. However, we determined that WestEd was not effective in determining whether SEAs were conducting effective oversight and monitoring.”

Why wasn’t this report picked up by the media? That’s the real question. Apparently, only one reporter did a story on it.

While Chavis and his pals are an egregious example, the overall problem here is that turning over public funds for a public purpose to private entities without requiring diligent oversight and review by public agencies creates the possibility for all manner of chicanery. With 1000 charter schools operating with minimal supervision, the odds are that there are many more AIMS type schools in Cali.

Exactly … how can almost 1 billion $ in Fed funds be handed over to charter schools in just 3 years and there is NO true oversight of where and how the $$ is spent … rampant raiding of $ for our PUBLIC schools and really there is no one in charge … Doesn’t each district with charters have someone in CHARGE of monitoring these funds??

It seems that a MORATORIUM on charters after over 10 years of ramping them up would be called for … lets not allow any more of our public funds to open new ones … until we see how many, and I am certain that here in Oakland we have quite a few who are feathering personal nests with our public $$, are not quite up to the job …

I posted a P.S. in the body of the article about the rise and fall of the American Indian Charter School. Since many may not see the addendum, I am putting here in the comments:

David Whitman, who praised Chavis’s school, is Arne Duncan’s chief speechwriter. Whitman’s book is called Sweating the Small Stuff, an admiring account of “no-excuses” schools that practice paternalism.

Did any of these “journalists” who sang the praises of this school increasing academic performance actual visit the school? If so, how did they miss that the school went from 6% American Indian to 1%; 32% Black to 10%; and zero % Asian to 68%? Could the shift to Asian students account for, in part, the increase in achievement? The 2012 ACT national composite score for Asians was 23.6 placing them at a remarkably high 76% “college ready” benchmark. http://bit.ly/VLcWHd Demographics is not destiny, but any serious study of this school should include factoring in the changing school population and the skills that students bring with them.

The audit itself does not discuss enrollment, which is in itself thought provoking. Chavis and his wife formed all of these companies that were paid by the school for services preformed. Chavis’s wife, while employed by the school charged the school (over $300,000) through her company for accounting services. Chavis had construction companies that charged the school, and he leased the buildings to the schools. Yes, the same ones that his construction company refurbished and charged the schools. The best was Chavis had a summer school company SAIL, that was paid by the school (with federal funds) to educate students over the summer. According to the Audit, poor performing students and all 8th grade students were required to attend and were charged $50./day for non-attendance. The teachers of this summer school were ex-students that were not paid but given scholarships for college that were paid for by the school(not SAIL).

This crook figured out how to steal the most money he could from the tax payers. After many years the public has discovered this theft. The Audit recommends that the Superintendent of Schools refer this to the Attorney Generals office. Let’s see if that happens!

Here’s something else that hadn’t registered when I wrote this piece. In the 2009 LA Times article, the principal of the nearby elementary school said this about his students who headed to AIPCS: “I’d say 70% are academically strong, and 30% are a cross-section.”

The principal’s figures match up with AIPCS’s Grade 6 to Grade 8 student attrition. Of the 71 sixth graders who started in 2009, 21 had left AIPCS by the 8th grade (30%), and of the 66 sixth graders who started in 2008, 26 had left by the 8th grade (39%). Coincidental figures, or not?

Thank you Perimeter Primate!!! I love your blogs!!!! You don’t know how much I love reading about the downfall of this charlatan. What a crook! What I find repulsive is that his charters and others have created legalized highway robbery. Basically, politicians have allowed these crooks to have full access to tax dollars and grant money with llittle oversight. I would like to see Perimeter Primate start do some digging into charters in states that have for-profit models. Even the “non-profits” are making a fortune. I beleive there is a treasure trove of corruption waiting to be unearthed. Too bad we can’t somehow sponsor a group to start investigating and publishing how money is being used.

I wonder if that is why they are closed today. I live right by the school and to add to the man’s wrongs he chooses to block one of the busiest intersections in the city of Oakland rather than have the parents drop off their children around the corner. It was closed today which suddenly the blocks beforehand went from up to ten minutes to two.

Thank you thank you thank you. Chavis needs to be exposed along with those that that touted him as the model. And he’s still collecting monthly rent!?! Today roughly 20 cities and 400 people and converging in DC for hearings at the dept of Ed on school closures/charter schools/privatization. Yes, Oakland is one of the cities in DC. We are asking an investigation of civil rights claims and a national moretorium on school closures and charter schools. Our Journey 4 Justice has formed a national alliance. We are building a movement to fight for quality neighborhood schools because education is a civil right. Get involved. Not only is Chavis a crook but he has a long history of mistreating students including a head shaving incident and use of foul language such as the n-word.